‘Strangers To Ourselves’ Explores Limits of Mental Health Diagnoses

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4.2 • 726 Ratings

🗓️ 21 September 2022

⏱️ 50 minutes

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Summary

Why do some people with mental illnesses recover while others with the same diagnosis don’t? According to New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv, the answer in part lies in the gap between people’s actual experiences and the language of contemporary psychiatry that names and defines their conditions. In her new book “Strangers to Ourselves” Aviv writes about people who she says “have come up against the limits of psychiatric ways of understanding themselves” -- a woman who stopped taking her meds because she didn’t know who she was without them, a man subject to years of failed psychoanalysis, and Aviv herself, who at age six was hospitalized for refusing to eat. We’ll talk to Aviv about her discoveries. Guests: Rachel Aviv, writer of "Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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1:08.7	From KQED.
1:27.1	From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Nina Kim. Coming up on forum, have you ever received a mental
1:30.3	health diagnosis that felt wrong or incomplete? One that didn't really capture your experience.
1:37.5	In Rachel Aviv's new book, Strangers to Ourselves, she collects the stories of people who found
1:42.9	their diagnoses or treatment or even the language available to them to describe their experiences failed them.
1:50.0	We'll talk with Aviv about what she learned about the limits of psychiatry from those she profiled and from examining her own psychiatric diagnosis at age six.
2:00.0	Join us.
2:09.1	I'm Mina Kim. Welcome to Forum.
2:12.4	Rachel Aviv's new book, Strangers to Ourselves, is in her words about people who struggles with mental illness,
2:19.4	place them in the psychic hinterlands. A place where psychiatry, its language, its diagnoses,
2:25.6	its treatments, or some combination of all three have failed them, in whole or in part.
2:32.1	Rachel Levive is a staff writer for the New Yorker.
2:34.4	Welcome to Forum, Rachel.
2:36.3	Thanks for having me.
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